Customers may interact with contact centers in order to purchase items offered for sale by a particular merchant. A new customer is usually required to provide personal details to a contact center agent, who in turn registers the customer on the merchant's ordering system. This personal information typically includes the customer's name and home address, but can include other elements such as credit card details, billing address, and email address. Such personal information can be relatively time-consuming to collect. For example, capturing a home address verbally may take 30 seconds.
Typical authentication methods used by contact center operators include asking the customer to confirm personal details, a password or some other personal secret which has been shared with the contact center operator in the past.
Contact centers may use the caller line identification (CLI, or number from which the customer is calling), to partially authenticate the customer. Contact centers may also use voice biometrics to check whether the current caller's voice profile matches that sampled during previous interactions. To do so requires an initial ‘registration’ process on the initial call with a customer.
Outside of a contact center environment, for example for online e-commerce purchases, customers are willing to provide their personal details such as credit card numbers and billing addresses, to online payment systems. The largest online payment providers store hundreds of millions of their customers' payment details. Such storage aids customers in future purchases—they do not need to repeat the provision of personal information to each new merchant or for each transaction.
Online payment providers have well-established methods for ensuring customers are authenticated correctly prior to each transaction. Such methods typically involve the entry of a password to an online form, or, increasingly, the complex analysis of a customer's IP address, browser profile, location, previous payment history, and other factors.
Such authentication methods are typically very quick. Several online payment (or ‘wallet’) providers provide “frictionless” login or authentication methods if a customer's relevant data (such as location, IP address, etc.) have not changed since their last successful authentication or purchase.
However, online authentication methods have not been applied to contact center interactions.